


Perfect Puppet

by sunshinestealer



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 10:13:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4560675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinestealer/pseuds/sunshinestealer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurloz considers his 'working' relationship with Mituna.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect Puppet

He’s your perfect puppet.

 You tell yourself that, even as he collapses into a ball of anxiety, gnashing his fangs and making animalistic grunts as tears run down his cheeks. In an unusually altruistic move by a handful of your former team-mates, you’ve been drawn away from your musings on the scriptures and taken to Mituna. 

 According to Latula, he has been acting ‘strange’ for several days now, the bottled up stress and anguish from your failed session pulling him down into unfathomable depths of despair. That was his role, as the Heir of Doom. Gifted with prophecy and yet unable to do anything about their impending destruction. Outcomes could be changed through teamwork, and a really good Time player. Neither of which you really have on your side.

You’re his moirail — you know what to do in situations such as this. He’s clutching his head, clearly in the throes of one of his heavier migraines. You’d direct him to the darkness of one of your secluded dream bubbles, but you simply cannot risk anybody discovering the secrets you’re harbouring. 

You keep the stories and divine prophecies just vague enough to tantalise Meulin’s passion for storytelling, drawing her further into your web — even if you two aren’t matesprites any more. Mituna has fulfilled his purpose in your Lord’s plans for this session, but you still pity him a whole bunch, so you keep up the moirallegiance.

You’re showing contrition. In the eyes of your teammates, you’re perhaps just a victim of the most miserable circumstances ever drawn up by the Fates. Creepy in your silence and your mannerisms and rather a sight to behold, with your gangly limbs and underfed, ectomorphic frame. You’ve had to go through the early death of your lusus, the act of unintentionally causing such a grievous injury to your former matesprite, and being (as they believe) utterly helpless in stopping Mituna, your dearest friend, from suffering such trauma to his brainpan. And, like everybody else in this limbo, you are prone to the gnawing melancholy that has characterised your existence since Meenah killed you all those sweeps ago. 

…Well. That’s what they _want_ to believe. They want to believe you were once a chatty stoner with interesting things to say and a friendly demeanour. That you weren’t gleaning them for information once you had reached your point of realisation regarding your Lord and started taking the scripture you had been taught at faith schoolhive more seriously than ever before. That you weren’t sneaking around, gathering objects from your planet and attempting to meet with your denizen for the express purpose of learning the best way to completely kill your session. 

The Scratch was a universal constant, of course, and you were rather perturbed when Damara discovered about it, and Meenah found out how it could be used so that team would all live on, despite being the most useless players of Sgrub ever hatched. All of you more content to sit and scroll Trollblr all day rather than dive through tombs, fight monsters and attain godhood. You were declawed, toothless, and stood little chance, even with all the time on the universe on your side. 

But... that's now all in the past. 

Back to the present. Quite a crowd have gathered around Mituna as he lolls in the perfectly manicured grass, snarling with his half-blind eyes screwed shut against the early evening light. His hands were placed on the sides of his helmet, as if trying to tug it off and rub at the temples beneath.

As you kneel beside him, several onlookers get the idea to step away from the troll and offer him some space. You drape yourself over him in such a way that he cannot really be seen as you unhook the chin strap of his helmet and shift it up over his two sets of horns.

Mituna’s face is not a pretty sight, once you brush away the dandelion fluff of his unkempt mop of hair. Half of the epidermis on his face is badly burned and has not healed neatly, leaving behind cracked, shiny skin. On top of that pulse dulled psionic veins and bulging capillaries. His eyes are faded and clearly not focused on you. 

He snaps his teeth together, a little too hard on the tongue. You wince, and watch as Mituna bursts into his usual babble of curse words followed by desperate apologies.

It takes a few more shoosh paps than usual before Mituna is well and truly calmed, and is no longer twitching and grunting quite so violently. There. Perfectly pliant again.

It may have looked to the others like a fit, the kind that happens to trolls unfortunate enough to catch rabies from a wild beast. But, no, it’s quite something else to you.

This is a failsafe. Your powers have only grown in the millennia you have spent practicing, and you’re now good enough to subtly influence another troll from afar. All you had to do to Mituna following his injury was plant the seed of fear in his head again, the crippling angst he had about failing his team… It’s enough to make him scream, shout, and overthink his fried brain into a maelstrom. You let up every now and again, but whenever Mituna gets too lucid or tries to get your manipulations out of his mind ( _GET OUT GET OUT GETOUT GETOUT_ )… pull him back by the strings. Hard.

Mituna’s incoherent, and your teammates are too awkward to ever broach the topic of how he got that way with you. Not that they’d understand your pantomimes, and not that you'd _ever_ tell them the full details about your revelations and why shit had to get wrecked so spectacularly.

It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?


End file.
